Andy Curtis might be a (One Yellow) Rabbit these days, but he started out a Loose Moose.

The guy’s default impulse is to find the funny in whatever he’s doing.

That is, until the 2013 High Performance Rodeo rolled round, and he found himself rehearsing Schlachter-Tango, a one man show about a gay Holocaust survivor, for a pair of somewhat, shall we say, severe Germans (Michael Grunert and Theatrelabor’s artistic director Sigmar Schroeder)

“It is an odd feeling to do something onstage in rehearsal,” he says, “and then have two guys who don’t smile much...turn toward each other and have an intense German discussion.

“It’s tricky because I’m a bit of a laugh slut,” he says. “I cut my teeth making people laugh, so it’s challenging (in this show) to not have that (to fall back on).”

Curtis is getting the opportunity to do both comedy and drama at the 2013 High Performance Rodeo.

Some nights, he’s one of the stars of One Yellow Rabbit’s new show, People You May Know, a very funny digital puppet show that tells the story of a Ponzi scheme.

“It’s been a little bit odd, I must say,” says Curtis, “because we rehearsed (People You May Know) so long ago.

“It’s one thing to keep one show in one’s head for a month. Keeping two up there is tricky,”

Particularly when the second show is Schlachter Tango, which tells the story of an extraordinary German who survived Auschwitz, but couldn’t survive homophobia.

It tells the story of Ludwig Meyer, a gay German Jew who survived six and a half years in concentration camps.

In 1948, when the Germans were issuing compensation to Jews for the treatment they’d endured during the war, they refused any for Meyer, on the grounds that prior to the war he’d been convicted three times of having sex with men.

Rather than accept what was then a German law outlawing homosexuality, Meyer fought back.

“He was quite tenacious,” Curtis says. “At one point, shortly after the war ... this guy writes a letter to the Committee for Wrongful Imprisonment, it was called — and he outlines everything that he lost, and the Reichsmark value of it.

“I lost a set of utensils, 47 marks. He outlined everything and said it added up to 22,500 marks — so he was kind of audacious in that way. And he wasn’t a rich guy in millions and millions of dollars. He just wanted his (stuff) back, and to get on with his life.”

Eventually, a few years later, Meyer opened a gay bar in Hanover, where it was illegal for men to dance with one another.

Luckily for Meyer, the head of the vice squad was a lesbian who drank at his bar.

“She would tell him when the police had raids scheduled,” Curtis says — although that didn’t prevent Meyer from eventually meeting a tragic end.

The show is the creation of Theatrelabor, a German experimental theatre group that are said to be One Yellow Rabbit’s German doppelgangers — a group of theatre artists who have been based in Bielefeld, Germany, for the past three decades.

They host an annual theatre festival not unlike the High Performance Rodeo (which they have performed at several times over the past five years in shows such as Absurdesque and Body Fragments) in Bielefeld, where they recently produced a German adaptation of the Rabbit show Smash Cut Freeze by Denise Clarke.

“We’ve had this little trade-off going with them for years,” Curtis says, “(and) they’ve become our theatre pals.”

Not that that makes it any less jarring when you get in the room with a couple of German theatre guys who don’t mince when it comes to delivering notes.

“They’re sweet guys,” Curtis says. “but they were also rather more blunt than Canadians tend to be.”

All of it delivered in a solo show, which for many actors is a kind of dream scenario — every line is their line — but makes Curtis feel a little lonely up there.

“I don’t have any solo aspirations,” he says.

“I like having people onstage to play with — that’s kind of where the things are that turn me on about theatre.”

Once he gets through the solo portion of his 2013 High Performance Rodeo, Curtis knows exactly what he’ll need to recover.

“I just want to do Lend Me a Tenor,” Curtis says. “(And) in fact I am.”

On February 8, at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church on 14th Ave SW, Curtis will be part of a one night only reading of Lend Me a Tenor at Radio Nights, the popular reading series.

“It’s totally fun,” says Curtis, “(you get) appreciative audiences and it’s kind of a low pressure gig for actors. You get to do material you wouldn’t normally get to do.” Radio Nights, Friday, Feb 8 at 7:30 p.m., $15 (ststephenscalgary.org)

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Honens President and Artistic Director Stephen McHolm was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Conservatory this week. He’ll be recognized at an April 14 ceremony in Calgary, at the Conservatory’s Convocation and Gold Medal ceremonies. The fellowship is presented to Canadians “who have left an indelible mark on classical music and arts education around the world,” according to a release. (Among the other 2011-12 fellows is Doc Severinsen, Johnny Carson’s longtime bandleader, who along with McHolm and several others will join a group that includes Oscar Peterson, Feist and David Foster).

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Everybody’s favourite Russian playwright is getting a Calgary run in February.

Chekhov’s The Seagull will be produced by the University of Calgary February 12-23 at the University Theatre, in a production directed by Brian Smith.

It’s a translation by David French, one of the first wave (along with Sharon Pollock and John Murrell) of great Canadian playwrights from the 1970s, so it should be awesome — particularly for a theatre town that rarely ever gets to see a word of the world’s second-most produced playwright on its main stage.

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And speaking of Murrell, if you’re thinking of heading to southern Ontario this summer, you might want to time it to coincide with the July 30 opening of Murrell’s Taking Shakespeare, which is being produced by The Stratford Festival. That’s pretty epic news, and when you throw in the fact that it stars Martha Henry, a bona fide Canadian theatrical legend, I’d say that’s worth a look. (More on this one when the snow melts) stratfordfestival.ca

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